Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man. You can make him carry a plank of wood to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this properly you require a crowd of people wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one man to hammer the nails home.

Or you can take a length of steel, shaped and chased in a traditional way, and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears. But for this you need white horses, English trees, men with bows and arrows, at least two flags, a prince, and a castle to hold your banquet in.

Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind allows, blow gas at him. But then you need a mile of mud sliced through with ditches, not to mention black boots, bomb craters, more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs and some round hats made of steel.

In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly miles above your victim and dispose of him by pressing one small switch. All you then require is an ocean to separate you, two systems of government, a nation's scientists, several factories, a psychopath and land that no-one needs for several years.

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, and leave him there.

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

alone in a radio stationbut I was never good at itpartly because my voice wasn't rightbut mostly because my peculiarmetaphysical stupiditymade it impossiblefor me to keep believingthere was somebody listeningwhen it seemed I was talkingonly to myself in a room no biggerthan an ordinary bathroomI could believe it for a whileand then I'd get somewhatthe same feeling as when youstart to suspect you're the victimof a practical jokeSo one part of mewas afraid another partmight blurt out somethingabout myself so terriblethat even I had never untilthat moment suspected it

This was like the fearof bridges and otherhigh places: Will I take off my glassesand throw theminto the water, although I'mhalf blind without them?Will I sneak up behindmyself and push?

Another thing:As a reporterI covered an accident in which a trainran into a car, killingthree young men, one of whomwas beheaded. The bodies looked boneless, as such bodies doMore like mounds of ragsand inside the wreckagewhere nobody could get at itthe car radiowas still playing

I thought about placesthe disc jockey's voice goesand the things that happen thereand of how impossible it would be for himto continue if he really knew. by Alden Nowlan